You might say that, but multiple political organizations through internal polling have found these independent journalists to have such a large audience that they get candidates to appear on them.

There are plenty of publicly available data points that present a reasonable case for this that im too lazy to cite on a friday evening, but there are a few in this reddit post that may help: https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ben0rp/is_joe_big...